Minutes of ISPA board meeting, November 29, 2018

 

Participants: Jess Lowenberg DeBoer, President Elect; John Stafford, 2012 14 President; Terry Griffin, Treasurer; Nicolas Tremblay, Immediate Past President; Victor Alchanatis,  Secretary; Quentin Rund, Executive Secretary

 

Could not participate: Ian Yule, President; Raj Khosla, Founding President; Ken Sudduth, Past-President;

 

The meeting started at 13.06 UTC-6

 

The agenda was appraised and approved.

 

The minutes of the previous board meeting were reviewed and approved.

 

ISPA Reporting: financials, membership, publications – not discussed

 

Administrative agreement: The administrative agreement is very similar to the previous. The board approved it unanimously.

 

Location for 15th ICPA : timetable - Ian & Jess. Two locations are candidates: Minneapolis and St. Louis (in conjunction with InfoAg). Having ICPA with Infoag is an advantage because of the broader public. We will wait to hear from Ian about Minneapolis at the next board meeting.

 

ISPA newsletter content: Jess commented on the newsletter. Suggested to keep the newsletter short. There are ongoing country profiles, Israel was due in December (should be in November) and then Ukraine. Regarding Landwards articles, it has a paywall, and have to find more details about the possibilities. Nicolas does not think that it is a good idea, he suggests to think of other ways to bring information to the members.

 

Country Reps : Guidelines - Ken & Jess & Quentin described the current situation. It was then suggested to create specific expectations from country reps, like alerting us for specific articles or information in PA in their countries that may be valuable to the society. Also, ask them for a report every year updating what is happening in their country on PA. It is suggested to include this to the duties of reps at the society policies. Not all representatives have emails and full information. Quentin will take a look and make sure that all information is available online.

 

Communities: Get board approval of change of the OFDS (On-farm Data Sharing) Community into the OFE (On-farm Experiment Community) – Nicolas presented: Originally OFDS was established and worked on data sharing issues in research and PA framework. It is hard to share data, and this created difficulties in the work of the community work.  At the same time, Research Data Alliance works on a similar initiative in Europe. Nicolas was part of both initiatives. In Montreal 2018 there was an initiative to establish a consortium for On-farm Experiment. The suggestion is to change the focus of ISPA’s OFDS, and join the group of OFE. The board unanimously approved the change of the name.

 

Website: addition of wiki tools – Quentin presented the website functionality of the wiki tools.

 

Status update of PA Definition project – Nicolas described the expectation on how to contribute to the process. This is a result of a survey from Montreal that yielded 3 alternatives for new definition of PA. A list of about 50 people who are interested in participating to this process. Codigital consultation is used, where everyone is able to propose changes and alternatives and bring them for voting. The platform allows for an improvement of the definition as it goes. It will be active until the end of January. The consensus definition proposal will be brought to the board for approval. Alex Escola handles the technical issues of the platform.

 

Future events: ISPA, ICPA, ACPA, ECPA, CLAP, Support of Vision Conference. All appeared in the last newsletter

 

Further agenda items:
The item of update on the relationship with Springer was left for next board meeting.

 

The next board meeting was set for January 3rd. 13:30 UTC-6

 

The meeting was adjourned at 14.30 UTC -6

 
Notes taken by Victor.